Music is a great theme that comes up at the end. It’s a technology out of reach, almost foreign to the Bundrens. Their fascination with the music box in the last sections is striking. And I like your thought about musical loops. To me the sections almost act, bear with me now, like if you were manually scanning a radio back and forth between stations. Maybe you listen to one song and then switch over. horizontally.*

I find that when driving around the country this sort of scanning is a cool way to get to know the town or local area that you are presently in. (Lots of christian talk or truck commercials?) We scan the Bundren’s life and epic and at the end, when finally there’s nothing left on the radio, nothing more to broadcast, the static is unbearable. Like a sudden power outage: “Meet Mrs. Bundren” — Honey, go get the candles!

Funny i can’t help talk about this story in terms of technology unknown to its characters–radio and electricity–it’s still after multiple reads hard to fully comprehend the deep remote poverty of the Bundrens. No wonder they had to lose mules, family members and freedoms in the process of exiting it.

*Going back to James’ question about time and the tense of things in AILD, I feel a sort of simultaneity that is slightly jostled or misaligned. For chunks of the book narrators speak from about the same moment, giving different perspectives of shared experiences. In some sections its like they are repeating an old tape or last night’s episode, it’s from some version of the past. Is Cash finally speaking from the present present at the end? I’m not sure, but find his personal looming demise (death by infection is my guess) more distracting. Cash focuses on the music so intensely because it is present with his pain and maybe, who could blame him, does not dare ponder future events. Handicapped, all he can do is listen and be moved around by others. He like Darl is no longer free at the end of the novel.

I saw this opera by the American composer John Moran six years ago. I don’t know if anyone’s seen/heard a Moran piece before, but it’s actually him, and in particular, this opera, Zenith 5!, that AILD is most making me think of. There’re eight people on stage in this opera, I think. I remember a guy dressed up as an “Indian,” an old woman in a rocking chair, a woman in a tight business suit, a small woman on a column in a tutu. Each character had a thing they did: the “Indian,” for example, would step forward two steps, raise his hand, say two sentences (I forget them), retreat two steps; the old woman would rock forward (the chair would squeak), lean in, make a noise, lean back (ditto), rock back; the woman in the tight business suit would march forward three steps, make this terrified face, show something in her eyes, and back; the small woman on the tuto would lift, twirl, return, sigh, lift, twirl, return, sigh. Each character’s “thing” was a component of the opera. Sometimes they’d occur discretely, other times overlapping, other times in rapid succession, other times only once every 5 minutes; each character’s “thing” was, at varying speeds (it wouldn’t’ve worked without varying speeds), on a loop. (Think of Cash’s horrible repeating saw: it’s on a loop.) The characters didn’t complete each other or anything like that. They had literally almost nothing to do with each other (except for the fact that they were on the same stage). And yet … their repeated overlappings created this whole. And, yeah, it swept me up swiftly.

The other thing I wanted to say, in response to James’ noticing that, somehow, there’s a wholeness or a coherence to this series of fragments, is that I’ve sensed this time around something like a single persisting voice. Running just under the polyphony. What I mean is, a voice that is present (if in the wings, or only for a second) in each fragment we get, a voice continuous over the course of the fragments. Is this Faulkner’s voice? Is Faulkner a character in AILD? Is “Faulkner”? Does some one voice—one not living in Mississippi, I don’t think, but within the context of AILD—persist throughout and within the succession of fragments? I marked two places with pink post-its. Page 56: “It as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components—snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve—legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames—and float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none. I can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape—fetlock, hip, shoulder and head; smell and sound. I am not afraid.” Who creeps in here? Is it, he, she disembodied? Calmer? Purer? Integral? Sober? Long dead? What butts in, here? Who? This voices that emerges here—it’s not, I want to say, Vardaman’s. Has it been here all along? Can it not be eradicated? Just even more briefly on page 63: “The cow breathes upon my hips and back, her breath warm, sweet, stertorous, moaning.” Who creeps in here? Stertorous? What? I’m willing to say that Dewey Dell does not use this word. So who does? What are they doing here? Are they an anonymous member of the town? An angel? What links the voice that says “stertorous” to the one that wonders on types of “is”es? I’ve learned, or been told (it’s near orthodoxy), that the single strong untainted authorial voice dies around the time that Faulkner is writing—dies, that is, in favor of polyphony. Wholeness for fracture; wholeness being no longer believable, not today. An unflinching monoglossia surrendered to heteroglossia type of thing. These are the times. I feel like I’m reading wrongly when James and I sense something like wholeness. Everyone knows (“ “) unified coherent wholes became impossible with modernity. I feel like I’m reading wrongly, too, when I hear a single voice persisting. When I hear, at least, a voice that persists just beneath the surface, and occasionally, without the fanfare with which the repressed typically returns (really, this other underlying voice just sort of quietly takes over for a moment), surfaces. What am I hearing? What is this thread that runs throughout each fragment, linking each to each, like the single thread that Quakers speak of? The one they say runs through each person present at Meeting?

I want to highlight one random bit from an early Vardaman section. I think it speaks to Faulkner’s unique insight into the nature of children and general human misconceptions. I will be slightly vague as to not spoil too much, but referring to Peabody the doctor who comes to check on Addie, the Vardaman narrator* says, “… I can feel the floor shake when he walks on it that came and did it. That came and did it when she was all right but he came and did it” (376). Vardaman here is convinced that Peabody killed his mother because Addie dies some time after Peabody goes into the room to check on her.

I was struck by this detail because of a personal family story. This sort of jump mis-association is something children do, as sometimes they do not understand injury or death. I suppose of I am an example of this. The story as told by my mother goes: When I was three my dad tore his Achilles tendon (ouch) playing basketball. He walked on crutches until we reached the hospital. Dad went into the doctor’s office. Some time later he came out with a big caste on his foot and leg. As the family walked away, I was heard muttering under my kiddie breath, “let’s go get that man that hurt daddy’s leg. let’s go get that man that hurt my daddy’s leg.”

Vardaman’s trauma will manifest itself in powerful ways and in some of the most memorable lines of this book.

Die Rose ist ohne warum;

she blooms because she blooms.]

Not sure how to relate this directly to Faulkner, Emily, at the moment, but your comment immediately made me think of it (almost as if I’d been waiting to be made to think of it).

Decades later I’m relieved to find such pleasure from this near perfect little gem. a few thoughts on A Rose for Emily:

The narrator does come with agenda. (Clearly from “her” tone she was not in Miss Emily’s camp, Sarah. A once rebuffed neighbor, maybe?). I don’t find her bias a deterrent to the storytelling because she serves obvious purpose guiding readers through the town, street, the house, introducing past and present forms of each with great detail, almost making them living characters. (Miss Emily’s aging house “lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons.”) I started to rely on her references of the three for clues to what had to be a mystery.

I have to point out that the narrator’s dismissal of Miss Emily as a “fallen monument” is overstatement and shortsightedness. Faulkner maybe uses the pettiness in the phrase to tease readers into focusing on the town’s advancements politically and industrially? It was easy for unaffected bystanders to get a bit slaphappy about Miss Emily’s decline, according to Miss Narrator. The Southern Belle of the 20th century arguably would be hard-pressed to claim Miss Emily’s tenacity under the circumstances.

(I would be remiss if I did not pay tribute here to my dear friend and Alabama native Maryln Schwartz, author of A Southern Belle Primer, Or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be A Kappa Kappa Gamma and New Times In The Old South: Or Why Scarlett’s in Therapy & Tara’s Going Condo.)

Maryln, who passed away almost a year ago, enjoyed Faulkner and would be quick to point out with her signature laugh that it is Miss Emily Grierson that has the final say in this charmer.
Finally, I was left haunted by Tobe. I wish he had had a say after all was done. Part of the lure throughout the story was what did he know? And in the end, why did he keep the secret? The scene of his exit keeps playing in my head. Why didn’t Tobe, Keeper of the Secret, tell the story?

My lingering is Faulkner’s genius. 

I like that you call the stratigraphy of “A Rose for Emily” affirmative. Considering my above analysis, I don’t think a lot of people’d take a story with no hero, and which demonstrates a kind of impersonal ongoingness, as affirmative. I wouldn’t exactly call this ongoingness progress; doesn’t ‘decay’ seem more fitting, all things considered? And yet, decay of what, exactly? Sarah mentions the contrasted ‘generations’ in the story; are the fading Confederate uniforms reminiscent of something we should not let decay? Maybe the story is so grim because the perspective of the narrator (whether male, female, or non-singular/impersonal) is still steeped in that older generation, even as it makes fun of Emily’s failure to transition (or appear to transition) from one to the next. Maybe it takes a certain kind of act of creativity to find affirmation in the impersonality of “A Rose for Emily.” But maybe that’s the challenge Faulkner leaves us with: find life in this. So we find life by affirming what’s awfully true in the story, yet by allowing it to itself be affirmative. Maybe there’s something in this story about how we’re really quite like ants, after all…